I've been researching this book (i.e., the one I've been researching) for so long now that I sometimes wonder if I'll ever write it. Actually, I'm a lot closer to the writing than I was a couple years ago, when I was so lost and emotionally hammered I couldn't tie my shoes, much less blog or write a book proposal. As I have partially documented these dark days elsewhere, I'll spare you the details. But the general shape of my intent for this next book was (insert much handwaving here) something about narcissism and something about the New Age and something about something that connected these two increasingly ubiquitous phenomena.

I could tell you that the deep ambiguity of that description is intentional; that what I'm really doing here is protecting my ideas so some unscrupulous plagiarist doesn't come along and rip off all my hard work and obsessive cogitation on these subjects, and beat me to market with the killer bestseller I've been planning lo these many years.

The truth of the matter is much simpler. I am merely confused.

However, as anyone who knows me can attest, I am not one to complain or become discouraged by such trifles. To me, the glass is always half full. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. A rolling stone gathers no moss. A stitch in time... Yes, always the optimist I. Plus, I've found, paradoxically, that confusion has been the best protection against the underhanded intellectual theft of my hard-won insights. If even I don't know what I'm thinking, how can anyone else? It's beautiful, isn't it? An elegant solution, if I say so myself, to an age-old problem.

And as long as I can write paragraphs like that, I need fear no slippage in my self-esteem -- another of the vast conurbation of concepts that have swum into my ken in this terminally troublesome period of my life, all of which I am attempting to stitch together into a sort of coat of many colors in which I will make my getaway under cover of invisibility and obfuscation such that the masses will be looking into the distance whence I've made my spectacular exit, mouths agape, jaws dropped full ambit, inquiring of each other: "Who was that masked man?"

Yes, well. Ahem. To get on with it then...

Another concept -- really a sweeping array of linked concepts in itself -- that I plan to work into this quilt, this fabric of alternate reality, is that area of re-emergent psychoanalysis known as attachment theory. It's originator, John Bowlby speculated early on that there were probably links between the styles of attachment he described and various personality disorders. Later research has borne this out bigtime.

Three developmental personality styles seem to be most associated with the fearful and dismissing dimensions of insecure attachment: antisocial, narcissistic and schizotypal...

Individuals with a narcissistic personality style are often characterized as conceited, boastful, and snobbish. They are often described as self-centered, pompous, impatient, arrogant, and thin-skinned. Their interpersonal relationships are often exploitative and irresponsible. They tend to lack empathy and use others to indulge themselves. ...family histories of those with a narcissistic personality style are often characterized by parental overevaluation and indulgence, with parental approval and affection often tied to personal accomplishments rather than the self.

I think of JonBenét Ramsey here, whose sole purpose in life -- as it was given to her to believe -- was to fulfill the avaricious beauty-pageant dreams of her mother and grandmother. Consider this neighbor's observation from Perfect Murder - Perfect Town: JonBenét and the City of Boulder: "The pageants were Patsy [Ramsey]'s gig. JonBenét was her alter ego. Patsy had the money, she had the costumes, and she had the kid. She could relive her own pageant thing. You got the picture right there. Patsy didn't have a sense of proportion about how this should fit into her child's life. What I saw on the pageant video... you don't do that to a six-year-old."

But continuing...

In general, the parental injunction they receive is "You are special, unique, and entitled to extraordinary rights and privileges." Because of the discrepancy between their inflated view of themselves and their diminished view of others, they tend to have a negative and disdainful working model of others. ... Although these individuals may behave outwardly with overzealous confidence, this is often a mask for the intense insecurity they often feel. Their caregivers give them the message that others owe them admiration and privilege. As this view collides with a fragile view of self, defense mechanisms that protect the fragile self-system are strengthened and their narcissistic behavior becomes more apparent to others. The primary feedforward processes associated with the narcissistic personality style include illusions of specialness, a disdain for other's views, and a sense of entitlement. These views further distance the individual from others, thereby increasing self-absorption and reinforcing narcissistic beliefs.

from: Developmental personality styles: an attachment theory conceptualization of personality disorders by Alissa Sherry
source: Journal of Counseling and Development, 22 September 2001
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2001 American Counseling Association

All this by way of convoluted introduction to a book I ran across last night at the Boulder Barnes & Noble, my home away from home. Apropos of nothing much, it's the first book I've seen with a 2005 copyright date. As soon as I spied it on the shelf, I thought that Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion might return me to my roots, as it were, after so many side-trips into subjects as varied as (but to my mind all interrelated):

• Ayn Rand and her so-called "Objectivism"
• Nathaniel Branden, self-styled "Father of the Self-Esteem Movement"
• Abraham Maslow and his "hierarchy of needs"
• Esalen and the "Human Potential Movement"
• Ralph Waldo Emerson and his pernicious "Self Reliance" trip
• America's long-standing notions about "manifest destiny"
• the history of American eugenics
• Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society
• JonBenét Ramsey and "parentification"
• the "therapeutic" valorization of pathological narcissism
• All things "spiritual but not religious"
• the occult roots of Nazism
• und so weiter...

Despite the seduction (for me) of the title -- combining, as it does, attachment theory and religion -- I wondered where this guy was at. I mean, was he one of these totally reasonable ecumenical types that I find exasperating to the point of going-postalism? So I had a little flip-through to see what I could see. The following inclined me to think better of author Lee A. Kirkpatrick's perspective...

It is well known that most (non-depressed) people tend to give themselves more credit for positive outcomes than they normatively deserve, be more optimistic about the future than is objectively justifiable, and think more highly of themselves and their abilities than is logically possible. It makes sense for evolution to have designed the self-esteem system with a positive bias, as a kind of self-deception that leads us to behave as if we were "better" than we are and thus induce others to consequently treat us accordingly. This bias gets deactivated, however, when repeated failure dictates that a frank reassessment is called for, as seen in depressed people who are "sadder but wiser."

Now that's what I call great comedy writing.

Unfortunately, Kirkpatrick seems to waffle around a lot, hemming and hawing about some abstruse philosophical crap clearly intended to defuse whatever offense he might be giving to those of deep religious faith. Me, I say nuke em all from low orbit and let God sort em out!

Evidently (and refreshingly), he has not always practiced this sleight of hand, as the following excerpt could hardly avoid giving the kind of offense I hold in such high... erm... esteem.

Kirkpatrick has published two longitudinal studies of religious conversion. In his 1997 study, 146 women readers of the Denver Post were surveyed approximately 4 years apart (times T1 and T2, respectively) about a variety of religious commitments. Of concern was whether different adult attachment styles predicted religious commitment. He found that when religion at time T1 was statistically controlled, those with an insecure-anxious or an insecure-avoidant adult attachment style were more likely than those with a secure attachment style to report finding a new relationship with God by time T2. Insecure-anxious subjects were more likely than those who had secure or ambivalent attachments to report having had a religious experience or a religious conversion during this time period. These results were interpreted as supporting the compensation hypothesis in attachment theory: God serves as a substitute attachment figure for those having difficulty forming human bonds.

from: The psychology of religion by Raymond F. Paloutzian
source: Annual Review of Psychology, January 1, 2003.
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2003 Annual Reviews, Inc.

"When anything can be put on the market with a couple of clicks of a mouse, there will be even more stupid movies, dull books, sloppy data, and bad analyses -- 'infoglut,' in the aptly ugly term of Christopher Locke, editor of Internet Business Report...."

Thomas A. Stewart
"Boom Time on the New Frontier"
Fortune, 27 September 1993

There's a story that goes with the above and the following. This is just to get you into the ballpark...

One of the rallying cries in business over the past 10 years has been, "We've got to get smarter about knowledge," And Thomas A. Stewart has been one of its most vocal champions. In The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century Organization (Currency/Doubleday Books, 2001), Stewart cuts through the knowledge-management rhetoric to reassert the simple, revolutionary notion behind intellectual capital: True value in this economy is not the stuff that companies own and sell but the information. capabilities, and culture behind that stuff.

from: FC shortlist by Jill Kirschenbaum
source: Fast Company, 1 December 2001
via: HighBeam Research

Back in 1991, I was working for a little CAD/CAM software outfit on the drop-city outskirts of Chicago. The company was called CimLinc, the burg, Itasca. I was bored out of my mind. Surely I was meant for greater things. This kind of thinking is what psychoanalysts call "grandiosity," and it can land you in some x-random mental ward with a Real Bad Diagnosis (RBD).

But I didn't know that then. So one day I called this guy named Thomas Stewart, who was on the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine, and was one of that publication's most visible writers on matters of business management and information technology. I had never spoken to him before. He had no idea who I was. Understandably, as I was nobody.

"Nice piece on what Welch has been up to at GE," I said. And it was. It was also the first news to come out of that company on a raft of progressive management ideas Neutron Jack was then fomenting -- and firing anyone's ass who didn't get it in about five seconds.

"But," I continued, "your article on Intellectual Capital is all wet." The article I was referring to was a June 1991 Fortune cover story titled "Brainpower: intellectual capital is becoming corporate America's most valuable asset and can be its sharpest competitive weapon; the challenge is to find what you have - and use it."

Since then, Tom (as I know him today) has become the world's foremost authority on intellectual capital. He wasn't back then, mostly because no one knew what that meant. Nonetheless, he didn't seem to take kindly to my criticism, and before I could explain further, he "thanked me for sharing" and was about to ring off in a huff. I barely managed to sneak in that I'd mail him a couple of none-too-flattering papers I'd written about so-called knowledge engineering. "You do that," Stewart said. And hung up.

Oh great, I thought. I just alienated a major business writer at a major business publication. For life. He'll never take another call from me. What was I thinking? And so on. A large part of the cause for my chagrin was that my job then was PR, the mission of which is to cajole people who write for Fortune, say, to write about the people who pay your salary. I had screwed up bigtime. Oh dear.

Thus, I was totally unprepared for a call I received a few weeks later.

"Chris?"

"Yeah, who wants to know?" I was in a bad mood.

"This is Tom Stewart at Fortune." I gulped. Oh no! Was he going to turn me in for Attitude Unbecoming a Flack? What?

"I read those papers you sent, and you were right about my article."

This was the last thing I expected to hear. What I'd said about the piece was that I thought he was mistakenly conflating human intellectual capital with "artificial intelligence" -- a field I'd worked in for nearly a decade, and for which I'd lost, in that time, all respect.

A few years later, Tom published Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, in which he included me in the acknowledgments, and to my amazement, cited those two papers I'd sent him: "Dueling Axioms for Concurrent Engineering: Automating Autocracy vs Empowering Local Knowledge," and "Concurrent Engineering in Context." This is surely more than you want to or need to know, but it was a big deal for me at the time. And it cemented a friendship that, by that time, was based on years of email and phone conversations. Tom is what David Weinberger would call "wicked smart," plus he's a lot of fun.

A couple years later still, I got this news from Tom himself, before it hit the wire...

The Harvard Business Review named Thomas A. Stewart, editorial director at Business 2.0 magazine, as its new editor Thursday, replacing Suzy Wetlaufer, who quit following disclosures about a personal relationship with former General Electric chief Jack Welch.

Stewart, 54, is also a member of Fortune magazine's board of editors and the author of two books on intellectual capital.... Stewart joined Fortune in 1989 after 18 years in book publishing and wrote cover stories on the Gulf War, executive power, American competitiveness and gay and lesbian executives.

from: Harvard Business Review names new editor
source: AP Worldstream, 3 October 2002
via: HighBeam Research

Tempting as it is to go into the whole sordid Suzie Wong... er... Wetlaufer... er... affair, I'll resist. For now. Suffice it to say that Jack be nimble. Musta been.

Yeah well anyway. Stewart's second book was called The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization. In Chapter 2, titled "What Companies Do and Why They Exist," he gives, as one function-and-reason:

To host conversations and house tacit knowledge. Markets are conversations, as stated in the first line of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a maddening must-read document* by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes how the World Wide Web -- inherently informal, infinitely interlinked -- changed markets by allowing customers to talk to one another and to talk back to sellers. It continues: "What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called 'The Company' is the only thing standing between the two." When the conversation goes badly, Locke et al. say, "the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control." [p. 31]

The asterisk (*), above, led to a note at the foot of the page: "If you haven't and since you must: www.cluetrain.com."

And later in the book, he writes...

Says Chris Locke, coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto: "In olden days you took your product to the market, and marketing was about trying to identify who to spam. But real-time, emergent markets literally don't exist until some voice, like the Magic Flute, pipes them out of the ether. In realtime, the question becomes what it always should have been -- not how do we package what we've made, but what should we make?" Once again, Drucker's question: not "How do I do the job?" but "What is the job?" [p. 97]

Tom asked me to blurb the book before its official release, and I was happy to do so.

In the course of writing this, I checked to see if my quote made that edition too, but was sad to see it was missing from the back cover. A few more clicks and I cheered up. Now it's at the top of the front cover!

All this has something to do with what I'm currently doing here on Chief Blogging Officer (!!!) and why I'm doing it on behalf of Highbeam Research. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to connect the dots.

Since I got on the subject of lost time and aliens from unknown netherworlds, I might as well bring in Area 51, without which the American mythos just wouldn't be the same. Somewhere around here I've got a book titled Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51. I never finished it (too often the case these days) but the guy can write, oh yeah.

In a 19997 article in Psychology Today, he asks: "Is it any coincidence that flying saucers first appeared shortly after the Cold War began -- in June of 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine bright discs In the sky near Mount Rainier in Washington?"

More to the point and closer to home, is it any coincidence that I was born in November 1947 after my parents were vacationing in New Mexico the previous summer? I have always wondered about this. Does it perhaps explain my excellent night vision, or my ability to compute π to 29,352 places in my head -- but only during severe electrical storms? Here Dreamland author Phil Patton expands on his findings...

...what I was astonished by was the whole cast of characters I found up there, and the way that the place functions as a kind of weird magnet for theories and a mirror to the predilections of the people who come up there. There were characters with names like Agency X and Psycho Spy -- a whole group I referred to as the "decentral intelligence agency" -- who picked together little bits of information.

But there were also the flying saucer buffs who believe that the -- that they were using Nazi technology developed from the theories of Nikola Tesla...

from: UFOs and Conspiracy Theories by Barbara Bogaev
source: Fresh Air (NPR), 5 October 1998
via: HighBeam Research

And with that we can leave this whole alien theme and return to more serious matters like Nazis and New Agers and the Theosophical ravings from which they both grew -- and, sad to say in both cases, are still growing. However, for a quick overview of the state-of-the-paranoia conspiracy theory regarding Nazi flying saucers, you could do (no) worse than to dip into Jim Mars's barking-mad Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us, or a weird, weird, weird little outing titled Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, which one Amazon reader-reviewer describes as "an interesting book about occult and pseudoscientific theories on polar shifts, the succession of ages, the Aryan race, the 'hollow earth' theory, Nazi underground bases, lost cities, UFOs, mystical powers, theosophy, sex magick and a host of other obscure topics."

But here's my question: who needs aliens when we've already got bloggers?

In blogdom, opinion is often fast and furious. This response from Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Rick Levine -- whom I haven't heard from in an internet-dog's age -- isn't exactly furious, but it did arrive soon after the previous post. Rick writes...

"The theory definitely explains a few things. No idea why we didn't notice before."

And includes this true-to-life photo of me...

The last thing I remember is this wide-ranging conversation Robin and I were having, about traumatic regression, the aura that precedes grand-mal seizures, evolutionary psychology and the metabolism of seratonin, the action of lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in the synaptic cleft, what these things say about childhood perception and consciousness generally, typologies, such as the Jung-inspired Myers-Briggs scheme, that distinguish innate (?) leanings toward the intellectual or emotional or... And there was more. Much more. But now it's all a blank.

That conversation is the last thing either of us can recall -- though there is a faint trace of something Colin Wilson says in his book on The Occult. He describes Madame Blavatsky as "a nervous chain-smoker who often soothed her nerves by smoking maijuana..."

Now look, I don't smoke "marihuana," and even if I did, I wouldn't spell it like that. Neither of us take recreational drugs or drink anything stronger than Gatorade. It's just that the quote struck us as being unusually funny, and we'd also been talking about Madame B. and how she popularized a certain runic sign that -- thanks to her pot-smoking fascination with the occult -- has become almost as widely recognized today as the Have A Nice Day Happy Face...

...a secret new faith spread across Europe: theosophy, as it was called by its prophet-priestess Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Theosophy was an occult cocktail made of Gnostic, Egyptian, and Hinduistic ingredients and topped off by a good shot of the Aryan myth. The followers of H. P. Blavatsky recognized each other by an ancient Eastern symbol of fertility -- the swastika.

from: Hitler and the Occult: The Magical Thinking of Adolf Hitler by Raymond L. Sickinger
source: Journal of Popular Culture, 22 September 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Popular Press

I can supply the specific Colin Wilson reference -- p. 431 -- only because that's the page the book was open to when we "came to" about an hour ago. Imagine my chagrin at realizing it was after 2pm on Monday, and that none of the many things I'd planned to post here had been posted. Or even written!

Or had they?

Give me a few minutes to check the hard drive and collect myself after this most bizarre experience! I'm worried. I'm sure you've all heard of the strange cattle mutilations in this part of the country (Colorado has had plenty), so I need to go in the bathroom now and check whether I'm... well, OK.

There was a bright light and a funny sound and then... and then it's all a blur. Robin says she thinks she remembers these big-eyed grey people asking her if she thought "size really mattered." Then she starts crying and moaning: "Oh no, not that!" Over and over. It's a little creepy to say the least. So again, please give me a few minutes to get it together here. And hey I'm really sorry about there not being any posts for a while, but after something like that, I figure you'll understand.